Heartographer housekeeping

Hey folks, I hope you’ve had a fantastic week! I’ve had a quiet one, as you may have noticed. :) I’ve been kinda heads-down doing some revamping on the site—some of the important pages like Safety and Tech Tips no longer appear in the main menu, but you can still access them via the new Free Resources page. As the name suggests, this is a collection ground for lots of online dating advice, and I hope to keep adding my most helpful general advice to that section. (Feel free to submit a topic request!)

This has been kind of a slow week in terms of online dating news, but a few notable things happened.

Facebook removed the ability for you to remain invisible in search results. If you’re truly concerned about privacy, you kinda have to not use Facebook at all. But everyone knows that’s an unpopular option—most folks who aren’t really into the site still begrudgingly create accounts in order to see baby pics and get invited to events and whatnot. Just FYI if you’re on the privacy-concerned end of the spectrum, since this feature was slashed fairly quietly.

HowAboutWe launched a couple new features. They sound pretty lackluster to me, which tracks David’s impression. But we’ll see how they go. My sense is that they wanted to jump on the geolocation bandwagon, but they didn’t really have a clear vision for how this feature could add value and lead to better connections. Still, give it time—this site definitely works better in more populated areas, but as they grow their userbase and rethink a few things, it will likely improve.

The impressive hacktivist maymay clued me in to an app called Lulu that aims to help women vet male dates. However, maymay cogently points out its many weaknesses. For example, if you’re a dude who’s raped or assaulted a woman (or otherwise behaved badly) and you don’t want women to be able to use this app to learn that you’re a terrible dating choice, you can simply opt out. Great for privacy, but kinda against the point. Girlfriends dishing gossip about their exes is a cute Sex and the City plotline, but the real value in women comparing notes is to make sure no one ends up chopped up in the trunk of an Oldsmobile. You can read about the Predator Alert Tool for Facebook on maymay’s site—he’s the same guy who brought you the OkCupid Predator Alert Tool that I blogged about a few months back.

My husband’s game shipped! It’s free to play, he’s been working on it for many months now, and we’d both be happy and grateful if you felt like playing it. Frankly, I think it’s pretty fun! I’ve tested it out now and then, and I always get too distracted by the fun quests to really be a good beta bug-finder, haha. It’s available on iOS.

We celebrated his newfound freedom by watching World War Z, and my heart about leapt out of my chest. I don’t do so well with stress or jumpy scenes. So tonight we’re seeing my pick, Don Jon. Yeah, I expect I’ll be blogging about that pretty soon, haha. Molly Lambert (one of my favorite pop culture writers) wrote a great piece on Grantland about Don Jon, and it seemed pretty free of spoilers that the charming trailer wouldn’t have already told you.

I’m a sucker for both Scarlett Johansen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt; now my eyes are going to leap out of my head from staring at these freakishly attractive people. I just love this image of them below. :) I’m looking forward to being able to weigh in about a movie that embraces the fact that many men watch porn, and the fact that many women create unrealistic romantic expectations based on rom coms, which I suppose you could call a kind of emotional porn, ya know?

Voltage Pictures

Anyway, I hope you lovebirds have a safe, happy, undead-free weekend! Look out for some notes about keeping up your online dating motivation in my upcoming October newsletter! (Sign up now if you aren’t on the list yet.) And enjoy the Don Jon trailer if you like.

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